With his eyes on the light, he again urged his horse forward.

The rain lulled, the clouds began to break, the landscape alternately lightened and grew dark; the outlines of the crumbling _hacienda_ walls that enshrined the light grew more visible.

A strange and dreamy resemblance to the long blue-grass plain before his wife's paternal house, as seen by him during his evening rides to courtship, pressed itself upon him.

He remembered, too, that she used to put a light in the window to indicate her presence.
Following this retrospect, the moon came boldly out, sparkled upon the overflow of silver at his feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow beyond for a moment, and then disappeared.

It was dark now, but the lesser earthly star still shone before him as a guide, and pushing towards it, he passed in the all-embracing shadow.
IV.
As Mrs.Tucker, erect, white, and rigid, drove away from the _tienda_, it seemed to her to sink again into the monotonous plain, with all its horrible realities.